It is the epilogue of eight years of legal battle in France. Former Argentine policeman Mario Sandoval is to be extradited on Sunday, December 15 from Paris to Buenos Aires, so that he will be tried for his alleged involvement in the disappearance of a student in 1976 under the dictatorship. Mario Sandoval, 66, is to be escorted Sunday evening on an Air France flight to the Argentine capital from Paris, confirmed the lawyer of the Argentine State, Me Sophie Thonon-Wesfreid, at World.
Exiled in France in 1985, two years after the fall of the Argentinian junta, the former police officer was arrested Wednesday at his home in Nogent-sur-Marne, a Paris suburb, after the rejection of one of his last appeals. On that day, the Council of State, the highest administrative court, had definitively validated an extradition decree issued by the French government on August 21, 2018.
"Churrasco"
Argentine justice, which claims Mario Sandoval to France since 2012, suspects him of having participated in more than 500 murders, tortures and kidnappings during the military dictatorship, between 1976 to 1983. Several testimonies have attributed him the nickname of "Churrasco" ("Steak", which refers to the torture of victims with electricity on a metal base).
However, Argentine justice has requested his extradition for only one case, that of Hernan Abriata, for which it has about ten depositions. A student of architecture, Hernan Abriata was detained at the School of Marine Mechanics (ESMA), a center for torture of the dictatorship through which some 5,000 people passed. Most then disappeared, often thrown from planes into the Rio de la Plata.
On the evening of October 30, 1976, a man posing as Mario Sandoval reportedly rang the door of the Abriata family in Buenos Aire, in uniform of "The Federal Coordination", a sinister reputation political police, responsible for kidnappings. "It is a routine procedure", said this man, according to the relatives of young Hernan. They will never see him again.
The body never found
Mario Sandoval, who denies the facts and believes that they are prescribed, had seized the Council of State to prevent the execution of the governmental decree. The Code of Criminal Procedure prohibits extradition when the crime is prescribed under French law.
But the Council confirmed what had said before him the Court of Cassation and the Constitutional Council: in matters of confinement, the prescription begins to run only with the discovery of the body or the confessions of the defendant, which n is not the case in this case, the young Hernan having never been found.
Extradition will not deprive Mario Sandoval of his rights to a fair trial, to respect for the presumption of innocence and to legal certainty, replied the Council of State, stressing that the ex-police officer may "Submit to the Argentinian criminal judge the elements which he considers useful" to prove his innocence. His final appeal, this time to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), was in turn rejected on Friday.
"Now he will join Argentina and will finally be able to explain himself before the justice of his country, which is the scene of the tragedy, where there are the most witnesses and documents", reacted the lawyer of the Argentine State, me Sophie Thonon-Wesfreid. “I hope that consular protection (…) will ensure that his conditions of pretrial detention are dignified and limited in time, including in consideration of his state of health, and that the effective prosecution is confined to the only case for which (French justice) authorized his extradition ", said Mr. Sandoval’s lawyer, Jérôme Rousseau.
Mario Sandoval, whose full identity remained unknown in France for a long time, obtained French nationality in 1997. A fact which does not prevent his extradition because he was not French at the time of the events.
